Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  Pete Hill Jr.—who accompanied his father, the Travel Air test pilot, to modify the Travel Airs during the race and who worked for Beech later himself—offered the interesting observation that the Travel Air Model R Mystery Ship was a failure. From a market perspective it was true, with only five airplanes ever built and sold. But from a glamour and excitement perspective, the Mystery Ship was a huge success. Aviator Frank Hawks set more than two hundred records in the airplane. Shell Oil Company bought one that Jimmy Haizlip (husband of derby racer Mary Haizlip) and Jimmy Doolittle raced. Doolittle bailed out of the airplane due to aileron flutter and was thought to have made the lowest, successful jump at that time, stepping out into space under five hundred feet and surviving.

  Barnes’s life became centered around aviation in as many venues as imaginable. It suited her. The often-perilous challenges she embraced, well beyond the tenacity of other daring pilots, defined her brazen disregard for personal danger. The recognition of her peers meant everything. She flew for Union Oil, opened up a new route to Mexico City for an airline, and flew stunts for the movies, most notably the larger-than-life Howard Hughes film Hell’s Angels. The silent movie was remade when “talkies” came in, and many of the engine sounds in the new version were Barnes’s Mystery Ship. Barnes helped start a movie pilots’ union and conceived the Women’s Air Reserve to aid in disasters.

  Barnes’s flagrant lifestyle took its toll, though never in her lifetime did she comprehend the concept of managing money. Her generosity and fast lifestyle, combined with her disinterest in keeping any tabs on her money, came up against the Depression in the thirties. Barnes lost much of her income and her Laguna Beach house. She saw opportunity in the desert east of Los Angeles and bought a Mojave Desert alfalfa ranch. Her abandoned husband, Reverend Barnes, agreed that their teenage son Billy would benefit from ranch life. It was time the boy became acquainted with his mother.

  Barnes didn’t even pause. She scraped off a landing strip and almost immediately her Hollywood friends found their way out to the ranch. Just east of Muroc Dry Lake was a military bombing and gunnery practice detachment. The nearby soldiers lived in a tent city, and desert duty was grim.

  This proximity equaled opportunity in Barnes’s ever-fertile mind. She bought more property, built a club including an outdoor swimming pool, and imported horses—no nags, of course. Barnes insisted on only the best (most expensive) horseflesh. She imported Mexican alcohol to stock her always-open bar.

  As the desert military presence grew, so did Barnes’s club (everything mortgaged, of course), and by the late forties, her parties were legendary. The place became so popular that she decreed it a private club, with the first official member high-profile aviator Jimmy Doolittle. Barnes brought in beautiful showgirl hostesses for her guests and put on a huge rodeo, including an incredible Lady Godiva performance. Ever evocative, she named her place The Happy Bottom Riding Club. After World War II, the military made the decision to turn the dry lake beds into Edwards Air Force Base. Test pilots made the Happy Bottom their second home. Barnes’s outrageous vocabulary, airplane stories of the early years, free booze, and her uninhibited ways were a natural magnet for the free spirits of the early years of experimental rocket ship flying. In fact, in 1952, when Barnes made her fourth and last trip to the altar, marrying her ranch foreman, the base commander Al Boyd gave the bride away, and the famous test pilot Chuck Yeager was best man at the splashy event.

  However, Barnes’s relationship with the air force had peaked, and the wedding spectacle closed a chapter of her life. Barnes had always lived beyond her means, so when the air force started buying out her neighbors, she didn’t have overabundant resources to resist. Taking the United States government to court in her quest to hang on was no small investment. It didn’t matter. Barnes taught herself the law and sued the government over and over again for a “fair” return for her property. Barnes lost her fortune to live in a small stone shack with a dirt floor and no indoor plumbing even farther out in the desert. Nevertheless, she never gave up plans to create a new business and a runway there.

  Sadly, Pancho Barnes, the pampered heiress of preposterous wealth, the most colorful character in aviation, died alone in her desert shanty—alone, save for her starving dogs who turned on the body she no longer needed. Barnes’s son Billy dropped his mother’s ashes over the old ranch house; then, within four years, he crashed and was killed while flying a warbird. The aircraft registry today shows that Billy’s widow still owns Pancho’s 1929 Beech Mystery Ship.

  Marvel Crosson’s tragic and mysterious death in the 1929 Women’s Air Derby generated much speculation, just as Amelia Earhart’s death would later. The news media reported that due to the rough air, Crosson had been obliged to jump from her aircraft, and her parachute didn’t open. Since her broken body was found in the mesquite a distance from her demolished aircraft, encased in her parachute, this theory seemed to have merit. The searchers who found Crosson and her crumpled Travel Air found evidence that she’d vomited over the side. They deduced that since her parachute pack was opened and she had “broken every bone in her body,” she must have jumped.

  Louise Thaden conceived a different theory based on her own experience with the Travel Air. Perhaps Crosson, like her, had been affected by carbon monoxide and had unfastened her safety belt to get her head over the side to vomit. In her dizziness, she accidentally flew the airplane into the ground. (The Travel Air seat was low in the cockpit, and it would be impossible for a woman to lean her head all the way out seated and strapped down.)

  After Crosson’s accident, a much-chagrined Walter Beech sent a crew to meet the racers at the next stop to modify the Travel Airs. Pete Hill Sr., his factory test pilot; Johnny Burke, a mechanic; and Pete Hill’s teenage son, Pete Hill Jr., were the modification crew. As fate would have it, Pete Hill Jr. was able to give a firsthand verbal account of what transpired to this author. Witnesses had seen and heard the airplane impact with no parachute sighting. Crosson’s body was tangled up in her parachute because the parachute pack, strapped onto her person, had ruptured upon impact. Pete Hill Jr. said they were convinced that Marvel Crosson had succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning, just as Louise Thaden had en route to the race start. Based on their findings, Beech had the remaining Travel Airs in the race modified so each pilot could inhale fresh air rather than the killer exhaust fumes. There was no further trouble.

  Though devastated by his sister’s death, Crosson’s brother Joe kept flying just as he was born to do. He became a famous Alaskan bush pilot, and, in 1935, he flew the bodies of Will Rogers and Wiley Post out from their disastrous crash in Barrow. Talk of a Congressional Medal of Honor for this flight was quashed by the modest Joe, who said, “It was not at all in keeping with what I did.”

  Marvel Crosson

  Amelia Earhart continued seeking and achieving records. It was suggested that Earhart was caught up in the “hero racket,” going for bigger and braver feats befitting her position as the foremost woman pilot in the world. On the other hand, all who knew Amelia Earhart testified that her motivation, indeed her obsession, was to promote and support women, not her own self-aggrandizement. Yet, it is Amelia Earhart’s name, not that of the first female astronaut or airline pilot or military test pilot, but the woman lost at sea so long ago, that is known by every schoolchild even today as history’s most famous woman pilot.

  The concept of an advocacy group for women pilots was a subject of conversation before the 1929 Women’s Air Derby and was more eagerly discussed during the race. Along with the other women in Cleveland, Phoebe Omlie and Neva Paris initiated an international organization of licensed women pilots called the Ninety-Nines. The group’s formal election of President Amelia Earhart occurred two years later, after Louise Thaden had chaired the group on an informal basis. Thaden deferred leadership, generously acknowledging that Earhart’s prominence would help the organization and its members.

  Earhart’s other lifetime affiliation with a women�
�s group was Zonta International, a service organization of professional women. Even today, both groups offer generous scholarship programs in Amelia Earhart’s name.

  Following Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic trip, attention centered on finding a female pilot/passenger for a 1928 trip across the Atlantic. Amelia Earhart’s name had been suggested to publisher George Palmer Putnam, Mrs. Amy Phipps Guest’s agent in the task to sponsor a willing participant. After the flight, Earhart’s fame led to a second-level career as a lecturer and author, particularly supporting women’s issues and writing regularly for Cosmopolitan magazine. Her burgeoning career was soon managed by George Putnam, romance blossomed, and they married in 1931. Earhart let it be known that they had forged a prenuptial contract, agreeing to part within a year if the marriage didn’t work. That didn’t become necessary. Both Earhart and Putnam called each other by their initials, A. E. and G. P.

  Earhart felt she didn’t yet deserve the acclaim she had garnered for flying the Atlantic as a passenger. She longed to fly the Atlantic solo, which she did in 1932 through the support and promotion of her husband. She flew her Lockheed Vega from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, to Londonderry, Ireland, inevitably earning and receiving the handle “Lady Lindy.” The slender pilot with her boyish haircut, flying pants, and breathtaking adventures seemed to define the feminism of the era. She later wrote, “I, for one, hope for the day when women will know no restrictions because of sex but will be individuals free to live their lives as men are free. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”

  In 1935, Earhart flew the first solo flight ever from Hawaii to the mainland, then the first nonstop flight from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey. She pursued and accomplished numerous other record flights. On land, she continued to write and lecture, raising funds for her flying. Although G. P. Putnam’s public relations expertise set up her speaking engagements and writing, fund-raising was a constant and necessary burden for Earhart.

  Earhart’s outspoken support for women’s equality did not take place in a vacuum. Progressive Purdue University in Indiana indulged their female students by hiring Amelia Earhart to be an aviation advisor, which included living in the dormitory with the girls. The students had daily access to the most famous, accomplished, supportive mentor of the day. A grateful Purdue Research Foundation settled accounts with the gift of a Lockheed Electra; they called it a “flying laboratory.” Earhart could now fulfill her longing to circumnavigate the globe at the equator.

  Amelia Earhart

  Earhart’s ’round-the-world flight early in 1937 started westward, ending in Hawaii with a ground-loop on the departure of the second-leg takeoff. The flat circle on the ground during the takeoff run could have been caused by a problem with the new and still experimental constant speed propellers, simply pilot error, or any number of other circumstances. Her accident fueled the gossip among some aviators that Earhart “wasn’t really a very good pilot.”

  Critics easily overlooked her regular exposure to aircraft often a step or two beyond her current skill level. She was always game to try something new, and sometimes the newly designed experimental aircraft caused unexpected problems. She was a pioneer tackling what could only be called temperamental air machines. As Earhart wrote, “Courage was the price” she paid for flight, fame, challenge, and fulfillment.

  After the Lockheed was returned to the mainland by ship and repaired at the Lockheed factory, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan restarted their record flight, this time flying eastward, since later in the year the prevailing winds had changed. This time, instead of crossing the Pacific Ocean first, they would depart from Florida to cross the Atlantic and continue on around the globe as close as possible to the equator. Though Earhart expressed her desire to wait until the next year and do the flight westward, funding constraints caused her to go ahead with the flight. Their hope was to be back on the U.S. mainland by the Fourth of July.

  The pair was challenged all along their route with mechanical repairs, waiting for parts, and dealing with the situations that took them off schedule. However, their delay in Lae, New Guinea, had to do with communication problems preventing a precise time hack, vital to accurate celestial navigation for their longest overwater leg to an infinitesimally small island. The lack of absolutely accurate time had always imperiled long-distance flights, just as it had for the early sea captains, causing inaccurate navigational computations compounded by distance. Earhart and Noonan had no choice but to wait for an accurate time hack by long-distance radio telephone. Finally, on July 2, they took off substantially overloaded, carrying all the fuel they could squeeze in. Their refueling destination: a tiny speck in the Pacific Ocean, Howland Island. Witnesses at Lae said they and the crew together willed that airplane to fly as it dipped below the end of the runway and struggled out across the water, laboring under the extreme weight for flying speed and clawing for altitude.

  Amelia Earhart conducts maintenance on her airplane during her 1937 attempted trip around the world.

  Earhart’s radio equipment was far less effective than any ordinary training airplane today, rudimentary at best, though state of the art in 1937. Though the Coast Guard cutter Itaska heard her call approaching Howland Island, they were unable to make two-way radio contact with the famous aviator and her navigator—one of the most experienced ocean navigators of the era. Her calls were loud and obviously close, but she said she could not see the island. Soon there was silence. A huge search ensued, but Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were not found. Some of the search area was off limits to Americans due to Japanese control of thousands of miles of ocean. That loaded aircraft at Lae was the last sighting of the acclaimed and beloved Amelia Earhart.

  Myriad imaginative theories about Amelia Earhart’s disappearance have developed into a bottomless reservoir of books and movies over the years. Some say she detoured north over Japanese-held territory (just prior to World War II) and was spying for her friend Franklin Roosevelt. But where did she put all the fuel to go that distance? Another theory had her seen by eyewitnesses all over the Marshall Islands, shown off by her Japanese captors who picked the two up off Mili atoll. Others suggested Earhart and Noonan died of dysentery in prison. In another version, they were beheaded. And then the “secret Navy files” have the whole story, but they have never been released.

  Amelia and a Pitcairn autogyro.

  Amelia Earhart’s name is still news. A little newspaper story recently read: “When Oceanside, Calif., police stopped the couple wandering along a roadway one recent evening, they possibly overlooked the story of the century. The woman claimed she was aviatrix Amelia Earhart. The man, carrying only a Holy Bible, was stark naked. They were searching, the couple said, for the woman’s lost airplane. Officer Bob George says police gave them a lift to county mental health for seventy-two hours of observation. And the entry in the watch commander’s log closed the case: ‘Searched area but found no airplane.’”

  I lunched one day with two old friends of Earhart’s who were among the cofounders of the Ninety-Nines, Fay Wells and Nancy Tier. I asked Wells and Tier if Earhart had been spying for her friend President Roosevelt or had she just missed the island. Their response was fascinating, each certain of her viewpoint. Wells argued that there was no possible way Earhart would spy for the country, with which Earhart’s friend Louise Thaden agreed. Tier was equally certain that Earhart would do it in a minute. In fact, their voices raised to the point where other restaurant patrons put down their forks to observe the senior citizens, seemingly refined ladies, shouting at each other. Had they only known these two were Amelia Earhart’s contemporaries.

  Earhart’s saddened mother felt that her daughter was probably a prisoner of the Japanese. Louise Thaden, along with Earhart’s sister, Murial Earhart Morrissey, believed that she simply missed Howland Island, ran out of fuel, and went down at sea. Morrissey named the Marianas Trench as her resting place. Earhart had said to Thade
n before her risky last flight, “If I should bop off, it’ll be doing the thing that I’ve always most wanted to do.”

  AMELIA

  Somewhere a fin on a lazy sea

  And a broken prop on a coral key,

  Somewhere a dawn whose morning star

  Must etch dim light on a broken spar,

  Somewhere a twilight that cannot go

  Till it kisses the surf with afterglow;

  But here, only silence and weary eyes

  And an empty hangar and empty skies.

  Somewhere the toss of a tousled head

  In the street of the angels overhead,

  Somewhere a smile that would never fade

  As the score reversed in the game she played,

  Somewhere a spirit whose course held true

  To do the thing that it wished to do;

  But here, only silence and weary eyes

  And an empty hangar and empty skies.

  —GILL ROBB WILSON, 1938

  Ruth Elder was called “Miss America of Aviation.” Among all the derby contestants, she continued to be the darling of the national press, who sensationalized her glamour, always equating it with aviation. Elder’s habits became a trend. Her brightly colored hair band was soon worn by stylish young women everywhere.